NYR, Volume 56, Number 17 ยท November 5, 2009
'The Master Poet of Democracy'
By John Carey
The Bard: Robert Burns, A Biography
by Robert Crawford
Princeton University Press, 466 pp., $35.00
Robert Burns is different from the other great European poets both in
achievement and in reputation. If you ask a group of academic friends to
list the great poets of the last two or three hundred years, it is quite
likely that his name will not come up at all. Should you draw attention
to his omission, you may well meet with some resistance: "Burns? Oh yes,
of course. But..." What that "But" implies is that Burns is not so much
a poet as a writer of popular songs, some of them embarrassingly
sentimental, and all of them lacking the stringency and intricacy of
serious poetry. Besides, your friends may urge, he is less a poet than a
Scottish national icon, even, perhaps, a Scottish tribal god. He is
hallowed, as some other gods are, in an annual midwinter ceremony on his
birthday, January 25, with the equivalent of the Roman Saturnalia, when
haggis is consumed, Scotch whisky drunk, and bagpipes piped, in an orgy
of assertive nationalism that has nothing remotely to do with literature.
It is precisely academic disdain of this sort that Robert Crawford's
searching and sensitive biography sets out to combat. Crawford is an
academic himself, a professor at the University of St. Andrews, as well
as a poet, and perhaps that is why disparagement of Burns by academics
worries him so much. It is not, one imagines, a circumstance that the
poet's millions of admirers across the globe lose any sleep over. For
Crawford, however, Burns's gradual disappearance from "the research
culture of modern academia" is a serious concern, and this biography
seeks to show why his poetry is worth literary examination, as well as
how it is illuminated by his life.
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Burns was born in Alloway, then a riverside hamlet just inland from Ayr,
in 1759, the eldest of what would eventually be seven children. His
parents were from very different social strata, and both had a lasting
effect on his development. His mother, Agnes, was the daughter of a
tenant farmer, and had received almost no education. She could read a
little, but not write. However, she had a retentive memory for folk
songs, and Burns always remembered her in his childhood singing to him
lullabies, love songs, and ballads, all in the Scots tongue. Thanks to
her, his imagination was fed by oral culture and folk wisdom and, as
importantly, his ear was trained. "Burns did not just make songs,"
Crawford comments, "songs made Burns." It was his mother's gift. The
great literary project of his later life was the creation of an
anthology of Scots popular poetry and song, and some of his most famous
poems, such as "O my luve's like a red, red rose" and "John Anderson, my
jo'," reuse and reshape verse from the popular tradition.
His father, Willam Burnes (as he always spelled it), was a man of
intelligence, education, and some social standing. He had come to
Ayrshire from the north, from the port of Stonehaven near Aberdeen.
According to family tradition William's father, Burns's paternal
grandfather, was a prosperous, able man who had married into the Keith
family and worked as a gardener for the Jacobite Earl Marischal Keith at
Inverugie Castle. The Jacobites were opponents of the 1707 political
union between Scotland and England, and supporters of the House of
Stuart. Their cause met with disaster thirteen years before Burns's
birth at the Battle of Culloden, when the army of the Hanoverian English
King George II, led by the Duke of Cumberland ("Butcher Cumberland"),
massacred Charles Edward Stuart's army of French mercenaries and
Highland Scots. "Bonnie Prince Charlie" fled the field, leaving his men
to die, and sailed over the sea to Skye, and from there to France, never
to return.
As a child Burns seems to have imbibed from his father a sense that his
family's ruin and poverty were somehow bound up with the defeat at
Culloden. Loyalty to the Jacobites and hatred of the Hanoverians became
permanent aspects of his poetic imagination. In 1787, on a visit to
Stirling, he scratched some verses on an inn window bemoaning "the
injur'd STEWART-line" and calling the Hanoverian royals "an idiot race."
On the same occasion he wrote a poetic lament for a Highlander ruined by
Culloden. His boyhood heroes were rebels and revolutionaries, notably
the Carthaginian general Hannibal, who fought against Roman power, and
William Wallace, who battled for Scottish independence from the English
in the thirteenth century and was executed by Edward I. One of Burns's
most stirring patriotic songs invokes Wallace as a national figurehead:
"Scots, wha hae wi' [who have with] Wallace bled."
This sympathy for the oppressed and support for revolution also inspired
Burns's poetic response to the events of his own day. He was, C
